In this article we present a novel approach for determining the electromagnetic modes of photonic multilayer structures. We combine the plane wave expansion method with the method of lines resulting in a fast and accurate computational technique which we named the plane wave admittance method. In addition, we incorporate perfectly matched layers at the boundaries parallel to the multilayer surfaces which allow for easy determination of leaky modes. The convergence of the method is verified for the case of photonic crystal slab showing very good agreement with the results obtained with full three-dimensional plane wave expansion method while the numerical effort is largely reduced. The numerical implementation of the method will be soon available on the web.